Wizard and Glass (Book IV The Dark Tower Series) – Stephen King

I started Stephen King’s The Dark Tower series over a year ago. I put it down halfway through book two and didn’t really care to pick it up again until I started driving to work and listening to the same CDs over and over and over and over…Given Rock’s assurances that the first half of the series was some of King’s best work, I decided to venture into audiobook territory. I started with book two again and, I was surprised to discover, I actually liked having it read to me. Apparently I started with a very good audiobook, as far as audiobooks go, because the narrator, Frank Muller, is “the superstar of audiobooks.” I have also heard two other audiobooks not read by Muller and the difference is undeniable. The man is an audiobook superstar.

And so it went, through book two and eventually through book three, and finally to book four, Wizard and Glass. At this point Rock assured me that book four was perhaps King’s best story ever. Actually, he had assured me about this for so long now that I needed to read it just to know whether I disagreed with him or not. Well, I listened to about half of the book before I couldn’t take it anymore. I grabbed his tattered copy off the shelf and was about 90% done with the whole book by the time I managed to stop myself so that I could listen to the audiobook that I had paid so much money for.

The story centers largely on Roland’s adventures shortly after winning his duel with Cort and earning his guns. Roland’s father sends Roland away to the far-off land of Mejis for his own protection, along with his friends Alain and Cuthbert. In Mejis, Roland falls in love with Susan Delgado and, together with Alain and Cuthbert, uncovers plans by “the Good Man” to attack Gilead, their hometown. The events in the book are defining moments for the character of Roland; it is, essentially, where we learn why Roland is who he is and why he sets out on the quest for the Dark Tower.

I highly recommend this book. I had enjoyed books two and three (and one, but I always see one as a separate story for some reason) but was oftentimes put-off by the sheer weirdness of everything that happens. I think the audiobook media was partly to blame. The story takes such unusual turns and contains so many other-worldly elements that if I zoned out for even a few seconds I would lose track of what had happened. On the other hand, while Wizard and Glass does contain mystical themes, it is, at the core, a suspenseful, romantic, tragic, coming-of-age adventure story.

One element of King’s writing that I found particularly enjoyable (though maddening at the same time) is his blatant foreshadowing, such as sentences along the lines of “and that was the last time they saw each other” or “he would come to bitterly regret this decision during the events that followed.” Of course, in a larger sense, we already know how this story turns out since we are introduced to Roland well after these events have taken place and can surmise how they unfolded in order to shape who he is. Still, blatantly telling the reader what is going to happen is, in my opinion, a very effective way of making the reader take notice, by putting the reader in the place of God: we understand what the characters don’t and we can see what they can’t, namely the defining moments that will alter their future. As the reader, I wanted to scream at the characters, as if I was watching a scary movie (“Don’t open that door, that’s where the killer is! Run! Run the other way!”). And I desperately wanted (hoped for) a different ending, even though the ending was always well known and inevitable.

The story is very romantic but it kicks ass too. Two favorite moments are: “the girl at the window” (again, an infuriatingly clever moment where King lets us know that this vision of Susan at the window is Roland’s favorite and strongest memory of her); and, Alain, Cuthbert, and Roland taking out 40 or so men by following them from behind and picking them off one by one. There are many other very good moments. In fact, I have nothing bad to say about this book (except that it was so tragic in my opinion, that I was still going on about it days after I finished it). It has characters I came to love, characters I came to hate (murderously), moments that made me giddy, moments that made me cry.